1) Policeman fakes cheating wife's suicide

When police inspector Gary Weddell discovered his wife Sandra was having an affair he decided to murder her and make it look like suicide.

When her body was discovered in their garage, strangled with a plastic cable tie with a suicide note by her side, the first officers on the scene concluded she had killed herself.

But a woman officer noticed something that made her suspicious.

Sandra Weddell had long hair, and most of it was INSIDE the loop of the cable tie that had throttled her.

The woman officer told her male colleagues that before placing any band around the neck, most women would push their hair up so it was OUTSIDE the circle.

The woman officer urged her detective colleagues to dig deeper. A forensic examination of the typed suicide note suggested mistakes in the punctuation that were often used by Gary Weddell, but never his wife.

He was charged with murder but given bail. In August 2007 he stole a shotgun and murdered his mother in law before killing himself with the same weapon.

2) Headless bodies in the river

In 1979 a man walking by the River Lea at Hackney, London, spotted two bodies floating face down in the water.

Police divers recovered the bodies, which were missing their heads, but they were not human.

They were the skinned carcasses of two huge bears, which were missing their paws as well as their heads.

Experts from the London Zoo identified the carcasses as Himalayan Blue Bears, some of the world’s rarest protected animals. There had never been any in Britain.

Scotland Yard believed the priceless animals had been smuggled into the country for a rich ‘rogue collector’ who wanted their skins.

They believe they had been killed by a crooked taxidermist who had dumped the carcasses, each weighing over 300lbs, in the river.

Not enough evidence was found to bring a charge.

3) The mysterious death of a spy in London

In September 1978 Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was waiting at a bus stop by Waterloo Bridge, London.

He was on his way to work at the BBC Foreign Service in The Strand.

Suddenly, he felt what he thought was a wasp sting on the back of his leg.

He turned round and saw a man with an umbrella cross the road and get into a taxi.

Markov, who had come to Britain as a political refugee from the extreme communist regime in Bulgaria mentioned the incident to a friend at the office.

Later he noticed a small pimple on his leg where had been stung.

Two days later he developed a fever and died.

A post-mortem examination discovered a ‘micro bullet’ under the skin in his leg.

The tiny ball, smaller than a pin head and almost invisible to the eye, had contained the deadly poison ricin.

It had been fired into his leg by an assassin, the man he had seen at the bus stop, using a tiny compressed air gun hidden in the shaft of the umbrella.

With the collapse of communism, the new Bulgarian regime are trying to help Scotland Yard identify the killer.

4) Babes in the wood

When 11-year-old Susan Blatchford and 12-year-old Gary Hanlon went missing from their home in Enfield in 1970, a huge police hunt found no trace of them.

There was even speculation they had run away together.

Then, eleven weeks later, their bodies were found in a clump of trees in Epping Forest.

Decomposition had set in and woodland animals had carried off some body parts. There was no sign of violence. It was impossible to tell how they died.

It became known in the media as the ‘babes in the wood’ case.

Although suspicious, detectives concluded they had got lost and died of exposure. A tragic accident.

A coroner recorded an ‘open verdict’ .

Thirty years later in 2001, convicted child killer Ronald Jebson made a prison confession, giving police full details of how he had abducted them in his car and strangled them to death.

5) 'The Bovingdon Bug'

When foreman Bob Egle suddenly grew ill and died, staff at the John Hadland Laboratories at Bovingdon near Hemel Hempstead were shocked and saddened.

Shortly after his funeral a wave of sickness swept through the work force at the labs.

It was thought to be a virus and so many people were taken ill, more than seventy, they even nicknamed it ‘The Bovingdon Bug’.

The symptoms were nausea and headaches, so serious that in some cases sufferers needed hospital treatment.

Then another member of staff, Fred Biggs, was taken ill and died in agony in a special hospital for neurological diseases.

A young staff member, Graham Young spoke to his line manager and suggested the problem might be caused by Thallium poisoning.

He explained his hobby was the study of toxins.

Hadland Laboratories called in the police.

When they arrested Young he had a packet of Thallium in his pocket, and more poisons at home.

The wave of illness at the factory had started soon after Young had joined. One of his jobs had been to make tea for his colleagues. He had systematically poisoned the whole staff.

It was then revealed that Young had got his job after being released from Broadmoor hospital after killing his stepmother and poisoning his entire family with antimony and digitalis.

6) Pollonium 210

When former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko was admitted to hospital dying from a massive dose of radioactive ‘Pollonium 210’ in 2007, Scotland Yard needed to discover exactly where and how he had been attacked.

The Russian colonel was able to supply a verbal ‘map’ of everywhere he had been in the days before he was suddenly stricken.

Using the information detectives using special equipment were able to track back his movements. Wherever he had been their special equipment showed massive traces of radio activity.

Eventually they arrived at a London hotel. There a chair, a table, a cup, a tea pot and even a dishwasher, showed massive traces of radio activity.

Litvinenko told police that a few days before he became ill he had met two other Russians at the hotel and had ordered a pot of green tea.

While he was called away to take a ‘phone call it was suspected an assassin slipped the radioactive poison in to his tea.

By back tracking his movements the police had found the actual scene of the crime.

7) Policeman stages wife's car crash

When police sergeant Stephen Jones wanted rid of his wife Madallin he thought he had the perfect solution.

He would stage a fatal car crash with her as the victim. After killing her with his truncheon he placed her in the front passenger seat of her red mini Metro.

Then he drove it off the road on a bend in north Wales and crashed it into a tree. He pulled her body out of the wreckage and left it by the side of the car.

At first it looked like a tragic accident, as Jones had intended. But he had made a crucial error that exposed him as a murderer.

Jones was over six feet tall, his wife was only five feet.

When detectives examined the wrecked car, they found the driving seat had been set so far back his wife’s feet could not have reached the pedals.

He was jailed for life.

8) Tory MP dies in strange circumstances

When police found Conservative MP Stephen Milligan dead in his flat, they thought it was a political assassination. He had an electric cord wound tight round his neck. Homicide officers launched a full investigation.

But his death was not murder. A forensic examination concluded he had died accidentally from ‘autoerotic asphyxiation’ – an unusual sexual fetish.

9) Voodoo sacrifice

The torso of a baby boy was found floating in the River Thames in 2001. His head, arms, and legs had been cut off.

He was wearing a pair of shorts , the only clue.

These were traced to a store in Germany. Scientific analysis of deep bone tissue showed he could only have been born in one region of Africa, between Nigeria and Benin.

The boy, named ‘Adam’ by police because his true identity has never been established, had been a human sacrifice, murdered by a voodoo priest in England. The case remains unsolved.

10) Road rage or foul play?

When Lee Harvey was attacked in his car and stabbed forty two times his girlfriend Tracy Andrews faced the media and appealed for help to find the “fat man with made staring eyes” who had killed her lover in an apparent ‘road rage’ attack in 1996. But Tracy’s account of the incident didn’t add up. Many of the knife wounds could not have been inflicted the way Tracy, the only eye witness, said.

Further police investigations at the scene of the attack in Worcestershire uncovered more of her lies.